Sandra Bartocha - Romania I

Text & Images – Sandra Bartocha

My trip to Romania began very sudden and unexpected: A call from Florian Möllers and the question “Would you like to go to Romania and photograph forests in the Carpathian Mountains - in two weeks time?”

Who thought that Europe is a spoiled continent where little uncultivated land is left and only small patches of untouched nature is preserved is generally right. But Romania is an exception. Romania and especially the Carpathian Mountains are a truly wild place in Europe. A place that contains vast pristine forests that are uncut by public roads and are home to a number of precious species and the large predators as wolves, bears and lynx.

Photo: Sandra Bartocha / Wild Wonders of Europe

I didn’t need long to think about it - I love photographing forests and I had heard so much about the pristine forest areas in Romania that I instantly decided to go.
With little to no time to prepare the trip I flew to Sibiu and was welcomed by Christoph Promberger and his family. Christoph and his wife Barbara are co-founders of the Conservation Carpathia Foundation - an organisation with the aim of preserving huge areas of forest by private equity. Their ambitious goal is to create the largest forest area in Europe, a large private National Park that will allow evolutionary processes to continue without human interference and to restore the natural ecosystem of the Carpathian Mountains.

Photo: Sandra Bartocha / Wild Wonders of Europe

Photo: Sandra Bartocha / Wild Wonders of Europe

After communist times the formerly state owned forests have been given to their former owners, many of them don’t have any relation to it and they have immediately sold it to the huge logging companies in order to make it into money. In a country where the average salary is 200 EUR a month this seems like a reasonable decision on the landowners side. The problem is the uncontrolled logging even on protected ground. In order to stop the clearcutting in these areas they will need to buy as much land as fast as possible.
My photographic aim for that mission was to photograph various subjects in the Leaota region that spreads over about 25 000 ha - from beautiful pristine forests, mountain streams, mysterious narrow gorges, the Leaota mountain top that reaches beyond the timberline and some aerial photos of the whole region to show the huge areas of untouched forest.

Photo: Sandra Bartocha / Wild Wonders of Europe

As this mission was very spontaneous I didn’t have the choice of season - I had to go in July - and every photographer knows July is not the greatest season for forest photography. So I had to make the best out of the given situation. Another problem was the logistics of going around in an unknown place and finding great areas to photograph in a short amount of only 10 days.
I was lucky enough to be provided with two Romanian guides - Mihai and Bogdan - who knew the area well, had a four-wheel-car and tried to make everything possible. They even offered to carry my backpack. The biggest challenge for me was to educate them into my way of photographing landscape. Going up in the middle of the night - reaching the target areas before dawn and finishing at 9.00 a.m latest - as the sun was already high up in the sky - with a whole day left to scout the areas before starting to take it serious again at 7.00 p.m. until dawn. We needed some days to get on the same track.

Photo: Sandra Bartocha / Wild Wonders of Europe

Please note that blogs reflect our photographers' opinions and not necessarily those of the directors of Wild Wonders of Europe.